Brandon careened around the corner, sparing a final glance back before disappearing into the tunnel.
Amy had stopped screaming.
Amy was gone.
Blinking back hot tears, Brandon ran into the darkness.
10
Cody Trebeck
“Shit.”
Cody shone the light at the end of the passageway, his throat constricting as a nervous wave of fear crept through him. Bricks and lumps of stone were piled up high, blocking the way ahead. The stones and rubble must have been stood for quite some time, given the moss and mushrooms that decorated and plugged the gaps and hollows.
“We’ve got to turn back,” Sophie said, voicing what Cody was refusing to come to terms with.
Travis leaned haphazardly against the wall, struggling to prop himself up. He looked awful in the faint glow of Cody’s torch. His skin was ashen, his eyes barely open. To Cody, he looked like his Uncle Jimmy had at the end of many of their family gatherings, elbow propped against the piano as he fought back the urge to vomit, none of that stopping him from ploughing down his tenth tequila and telling Aunt Gilly to go to hell. Cody and Sophie exchanged a look, her worry reflected back at him.
“No!” Travis barked, half-raising a hand. The very effort of it a monumental feat. “We’ve walked for hours through this mole hole. We’re not turning back now. Nope. No way. Not doing it.” He hiccupped and stumbled, grasping the wall for support. “You’ve got to be high as a kite, my friend. Nuh-uh.”
Cod’s shoulders softened. “We’ve got no choice. I don’t like it either, but we can’t dig our way out of here. We should’ve gone the other way.”
Sophie placed a hand on his arm. “We couldn’t have known.”
“Kyle clearly did.” Cody placed his hand on hers, still unable to look her directly in the eye while they were touching. He hated it, that feeling that broiled in his stomach that told him he wasn’t worthy, that he was just imagining the connection between the pair of them. Why couldn’t he lean into it? Why couldn’t he just grab her hand and be close to her? Why was he waiting for her to make the first move?
Because you’re trapped down here. One wrong move and you not only piss her off, but you break the magic. Isn’t it better to wonder if there’s a possibility than to know that there’s not? Besides…What are you going to do? Make out in a cold, dank tunnel while you try to avoid capture from those creatures? Are you forgetting that Travis is here, too? A kid who probably shouldn’t be walking solo? A kid who is definitely in need of medical attention.
Travis’ elbow slipped, his head coming dangerously close to hitting the wall. He collected himself, threw them both a goofy smile, then folded over and unleashed a torrent of vomit onto the floor.
Sophie sighed. She crossed to Travis and rubbed his back. Travis gave a pitiful whimper as another wave of bile expelled from between his lips.
“Are you okay?” Cody asked, knowing the answer already.
“Oh, fine. Just dandy,” Travis managed, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “I feel like a million dollars.”
Cody resisted countering his sarcasm, instead choosing to join Sophie at his side while avoiding the pool of vomit on the floor. “We need to carry you.”
“How?” Sophie asked. “We’re already exhausted. Carrying him is going to take three times as long to retrace our steps and find the other tunnel. And even if we do get there, we have no idea what’s on the other side. It could be another dead end.”
Cody shook his head. “No. We have to try. Besides, the other tunnel has to lead somewhere. It just has to.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because Kyle hasn’t shown his fugly mug. If the other way was blocked too, we’d have seen him by now.” Cody screwed up his fists in frustration. “Can you believe that guy? Leaving us two to look out for his so-called best friend.”
“Kyle is a prick,” Travis said weakly, gathering his breath as the urge to throw up subsided.
Cody raised his eyebrows. Sophie gave Cody a look over the top of the bent over Travis.
“I really thought he’d be back by now.” Travis’ body shuddered as a couple of tears dropped to the floor. “Guys, I’m scared.”
Sophie delicately patted his back. “I know. We are, too.”
Cody straightened up, shining his torch back the way they had come. He froze, certain that, for half a second, he had seen something moving down the tunnel. The shape of… something on the edge of the darkness, retreating as the cone of the torchlight did its best to break the shadows.
“Cody?”
Cody shrugged it off, certain that the darkness was playing tricks on him. If it was those things, they’d have come straight at him, surely? The last thing he wanted to do was alarm anyone further. Besides, they had no choice but to go ahead, the other arm of the tunnel the only possible solace from what would remain the most haunting and exhausting night of his life.
“Let’s go,” Cody said, his hand wrapping around the box cutter in his pocket as his mind drifted to thoughts of Brandon and Amy, hoping that at least they were okay together.
The strange something that lingered on the edge of the darkness appeared and disappeared on a number of occasions as they took the laborious trek back. While Travis had been exaggerating, stating that the first journey had taken them hours to travel, their way back certainly felt that way to Cody. Travis was difficult to carry on his back, a mass of lean, dense muscle. He gripped weakly around Cody’s shoulders, occasionally granting him a break from Cody having to hold him up, but the high school athlete kept fading in and out of consciousness, and with each fade out, his grip weakened and he slid backwards, arms pulling on Cody’s throat and making him gasp for air.
Cody’s legs throbbed with exhaustion, his knees pulsing pain with each step. The extra exertion kept him warm, but it did little to ease his apprehension as the figure danced on the edge of his vision. Each time, it would appear as nothing more than a grey blur on a black background, and each time they caught up to where it had appeared, they would encounter some kind of rock or outcrop of the wall.
Is this what delirium feels like? Is this the encroaching madness? You’re seeing things, Cody. You’re going insane.
Sophie strode alongside Cody, occasionally helping him adjust Travis to a better position. On one occasion she took the weight of him, but only managed fifty feet before she had to switch back. “We should’ve stocked up on some of Davidson’s nutrition bars. Why didn’t we think of food?”
“Because we’re kids,” Cody replied, having already had the same thought on multiple occasions. “I’m thirsty.”
“Lick the walls?” Sophie laughed, the sound hollow as it reverberated down the tunnel.
Cody grinned, too tired to laugh. He took Travis’ weight once again from Sophie and marched onward, a renewed vigour from the simple act of her laughing. Such a normal sound punctuating an abnormal situation. Normalcy felt good.
When they finally returned to the fork, Cody gave a sigh of relief and eased Travis to the side. Cody rested his hands on his thighs, recuperating his breath as he tried to ignore the burning in his legs. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could go on, he only knew that he must.
Sophie crouched beside Travis who lay fast asleep on the damp, cold floor. She moved her ear to his mouth and felt his forehead. “He’s burning up, but at least he’s breathing.”
“What do we do?”
Sophie let out a long breath. “I don’t know. There are few outward signs of damage, but there’s something seriously wrong with him. Brandon was right, we should never have moved him.”
“Are you saying we should have left him for those things?”
“Not at all. But… I don’t know…”
Cody gave an understanding nod. He crouched beside Sophie. Travis’ breath was shallow, hardly noticeable between his layers of clothing. At a distance, he might have assumed him dead. “Fuck.”
Sophie nodded empathet
ically.
“He’s right, you know,” Sophie said.
“About what?”
“Kyle is a massive prick.”
“And you’re just discovering that?”
Sophie chewed her lip. “It seems like you are. Tell me honestly, why did you even come out with Kyle tonight? If a teenage boy showed up at my house in the middle of the night, you best believe that I know what he wanted.”
“Sex?” Cody said without a moment’s pause.
“No!” Sophie shoved him playfully. “Is that all you guys think about?”
Cody blushed.
Sophie chuckled. “I mean… Probably the stuff leading up to that at least. It’s never an innocent visit, is it? But you… I’m failing to see why you would leave your uncle’s house to go out in the middle of the night and play basketball. You must have known that Kyle had a reputation?”
“I knew he could be… difficult. But he was my chaperone. He was good to me, at least for a few weeks. He showed me around, helped me get my bearings. I felt lucky… to be in with the popular crowd from the start. American schools are different to the English ones, I’ve seen your TV shows. You think I wanted to isolate myself by not going along with the fun?” Cody cast his eyes to Travis’ serene face. “Besides, sometimes you do stupid things to forget the ghosts that won’t leave you alone at night.”
Sophie’s brow creased. She stared intently at Cody, his cheeks burning under her gaze. “What do you mean? Is this something to do with that episode in the lunch hall?”
Cody’s eyes stung as he fought back tears. It came on so suddenly that he was defenceless to it. He turned away, ashamed that Sophie was seeing him cry as the ghosts of his mother and father stood not ten feet away in the shadows. He closed his eyes, and they followed, the weight of it all suddenly more than he could take. He tried to answer Sophie as she wrapped an arm around his shoulders and held him close, but instead, all he could do was cry. His stomach gurgled with hunger, his muscles ached, his body was exhausted, but in that moment, it felt good to let go. Good to submit to the natural commands of his body. The grief he had pent up which exploded unexpectedly like a geyser plugged with bravado surged now, racking his body with tears as she held him close. Her perfume was long gone, replaced instead with the musty scent of her sweat. Not unpleasant. Familiar. As though, deep down, once you scrape away all the layers of pretence and artificiality that we paint ourselves with, we’re all just the same. All capable to be haunted and scarred by the world, all nothing more than manufactured cardboard cut-outs of a species that loves and laughs and cries the same. When stripped to the necessary urges to survive, when banished from the ability to prosper and rank ourselves, we find what is truly common among our kind.
Cody cried until he couldn’t, face buried in Sophie’s collar. When his tank was empty, he remained there for an unknown length of time, his grief morphing to fear of what he would find when he raised his head. He had just expelled his tears onto the girl his heart yearned for. A girl so strong of will, and so empowered in her own self value that she would, without doubt, mock the silly little boy sobbing on her shoulder. He screwed his eyes shut and hid until she shifted beneath him, but soon he had no choice but to move.
His eyes still tightly closed. A delicate finger on his chin. Soft lips brushing against his. A moment of tender confusion.
Cody teased his eyes open, his breath stolen as Sophie’s lips pressed against his. Her eyes were closed, her movements delicate. Her lips were warm, wet. He kissed back, losing himself in the moment.
It could have been fleeting, it might have lasted forever. When Sophie pulled back, a coy grin lay on her lips. Cody chuckled, unsure what else to do as his eyes cast to the floor. “Thanks,” he muttered, unsure what else to say.
Sophie tilted her head at a slight angle, her smile beautiful, accentuating lips he had just kissed. “It felt like you needed it.”
Cody smirked, his tongue swollen in his mouth, unsure what else to say. Luckily, Sophie spared him the pain. “Come on. We’ve got to keep moving. No point going through all of this if we’re just going to stop and rot down here.”
Cody nodded, accepting Sophie’s help as he raised the sleeping Travis over his shoulders. He bore him in a fireman’s lift, finding this method a little easier to carry, the weight distributed more evenly and less dependent on Travis’ input.
They turned towards the fork not yet travelled and started their journey. The tunnel was dark. Water dripped and echoed. The light wore down. Unspoken thoughts lingered between them.
Five minutes later, a bone-chilling scream reached their ears.
11
Alex Goins
The storm pressed in on all sides, the concept of a dominant wind direction falling by the wayside as the storm battered every inch of Alex’s body.
The decision had been a painful one, and something that he debated with every step he trudged into the snow. Cody was his charge, his reason for being, the very reason he had even entered into the storm in the first place, but now he was directionless and lost. Muddled and stolen by the storm. A compass with no polar magnetism.
It had become apparent from the moment he had wrapped Damien up in a series of blankets stolen from an abandoned cupboard at the rear of the church. Thick pieces of cloth left for some unknown purpose that Alex couldn’t identify which morphed into a safe cocoon of warmth for the young kid. Alex worked the material into a papoose and fixed it to his back, fashioning the device in the way he had observed the tribal women of Mongolia during his visit to the rainforests. A technique handed down through generations to allow women to continue working while their children snoozed on their back. A fitting solution to a problem that Alex never foresaw. From the moment the bonds were secure, and the door to the church was opened, Alex knew he was lost.
Until that moment, he hadn’t realised how much he was relying on Tori, not only for her company in the midst of this madness, but for a solid idea of direction. Together, they had a plan. They each had an end goal. And now both of them had been snatched from that, shoved off-track by some monstrous beast taken over by the wendigos.
Alex wondered what the true nature of their relationship had been. The man—Karl—had been perverse, but was that just a symptom of the substance crawling through his veins? Could she really have been in some kind of carnal relationship with that man? What did that say about her? Someone of his size would destroy her, surely?
There was no time to find an answer. Alex knew he had to move fast to find her again. There was some relief, however. Thanks to the weight of Tori’s unconscious body, there were deep grooves left in the snow. While the storm was doing all that it could to claim the track and throw him off course, there was no denying that he had a path. He had a trail. While Karl’s footprints might have been lost, the snow was slower to claim the smooth hollow of the tracks that Tori’s body left behind.
And that was where Alex began.
The wind was relentless, the snow painful with each tiny pellet it threw. Alex’s nose grew sore, then numb, then sore some more. He could only guess at the temperature, but he had never felt anything like this before. He thought that the heat in the Egyptian deserts was more than he could bare, but what he wouldn’t give right now for a break in the flurry of cloud cover, even if it meant being watched by the eye of the crimson aurora.
Alex shuddered, his thoughts passeing to the Aurora, wondering if it was all somehow connected. Certain that it had to be, somehow. A sky that bled. A town that bled.
And so, Tori bled.
Damien was silent, for the most part. Occasionally he would shift in the papoose, trying to make himself more comfortable. With each movement, Alex reminded the boy that his fidgeting was slowing them both down. He couldn’t believe the willpower on this kid, the fact that Damien had found the inner strength to fire the rifle at Karl. Even if his aim had been poor, Alex was certain that Damien had gone a long way to sparing all of their lives.
For a lit
tle longer at least. If Tori was, indeed, still breathing.
Time passed and, increasingly, Alex couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. Figures appeared in the farthest reaches of the storm, watching like sentinels, or so it appeared. He wasn’t sure if his overactive mind was playing tricks on him, or if it was telling him the truth. All that he knew was that he had to believe the worst, which was getting easier all the time, especially now that the tracks were beginning to fade.
How fast had Karl been moving through the snow? How rapid had his descent into madness been if he was already loping around as one of them, naked and unaffected by the snow? Alex dug down deeper into his strength reserves and tailed after the trail, but it wasn’t enough. While he passed buildings he vaguely recognised, all too soon the trail vanished, and Alex was left with no indication of where they had gone.
Or where he and Damien had come from.
The trail behind was gone. The footprints faded like snowflakes melting on the surface of a puddle.
For the first time since he had set forth into the storm, Alex gave a primal cry of frustration. The wind battered his face, entered his mouth and froze his throat, but it couldn’t stop the heat of rage that exploded from him. He didn’t care if those things could hear him, he didn’t care if they came for him now, he had his weapons and he was prepared for the attack. He’d find her, no matter what it took.
When Winter Comes | Book 3 | Black Ice Kills Page 6